LinkedIn can be a very effective tool for a number of professional and business goals, whether you’re looking for job opportunities, doing basic networking, or uncovering prospects for your business.

If you’re going to use this approach, make sure to think things through before sending out connection requests, and this checklist of tips can help you avoid making some common mistakes.

LinkedIn is a critical resource for networking in today’s world. Whether you’re an entrepreneur or freelancer looking for more exposure or someone looking for a new job, it’s important to have a complete LinkedIn profile and to put your best face forward. This is a critical part of your personal branding, and it’s also a great way for prospective employers or prospective customers to find you.

This article has 10 common mistakes and very helpful tips for managing your LinkedIn account.

1. Not Displaying Your Personal Photo
It all really comes down to having social media credibility or not. There are too many fake profiles on LinkedIn, so you want to show that you are real. If you have taken the time to complete your LinkedIn profile, why wouldn’t you display your photo? It just raises too many potential questions. And company logos or photos of pets obviously have no value here

2. LinkedIn Profile Headline is Not Branded Enough
See that space underneath your name? That is your “Professional” or Profile Headline. It will appear in search results next to your name, as well as next to any questions you ask or answer. It is, in essence, your elevator speech in a few words. Are you just putting your title and company name here? Don’t! This is the place where you need to appeal to anyone who finds you in a search result to reach out and look at your profile. Your Profile Headline is the single most important piece of real estate on your LinkedIn Profile, and you need to brand it as such. This really ties into personal branding as a job applicant.

Read the entire article and update your LinkedIn page today. Also, check out more LinkedIn tips from this blog.

Social media is a twenty-first century revolution that has swept the globe. It has given billions of people new opportunities to share their voices, connect, and facilitate the type of discussion that helps propagate more revolutions. It has infiltrated television, movies, advertising, mobile phones, online education, and a whole slew of other niches that are heavily embedded in many peoples’ daily lifestyles. To say that social media is here to stay would be an absurd understatement. In a way, the world is moving towards virtual connectivity on a level that parallels the time when the Internet first became available for personal use.

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If you’re serious about finding a job in any professional career, you have to be on LinkedIn. Also, if you have a job but might be interested in a new job, the advice is the same.

Hopefully you’ve already heard this from others and you already have a profile. In that case do research on how to beef it up and get more prospective employers to find it.

If you haven’t heard this, or you’ve just been lazy about getting going, then get on there now and put up a profile!

Here’s some interesting information from a recent Fortune article on how LinkedIn will fire up your career.

If you need a job, or just want a better one, here’s a number that will give you hope: 50,000. That’s how many people the giant consulting firm Accenture plans to hire this year. Yes, actual jobs, with pay. It’s looking for telecom consultants, finance experts, software specialists, and many more. You could be one of them — but will Accenture find you?

To pick these hires the old-fashioned way, the firm would rely on headhunters, employee referrals, and job boards. But the game has changed. To get the attention of John Campagnino, Accenture’s head of global recruiting, you’d better be on the web.

To put a sharper point on it: If you don’t have a profile on LinkedIn, you’re nowhere. Partly motivated by the cheaper, faster recruiting he can do online, Campagnino plans to make as many as 40% of his hires in the next few years through social media. Says he: “This is the future of recruiting for our company.”

Facebook is for fun. Tweets have a short shelf life. If you’re serious about managing your career, the only social site that really matters is LinkedIn. In today’s job market an invitation to “join my professional network” has become more obligatory — and more useful — than swapping business cards and churning out résumés.

Companies explain that LinkedIn is more effective at finding qualified candidates, but it’s also more cost effective as well since employers don’t have to pay a recruiter.

Now it’s time to get started!

If you’re looking for an executive position, don’t be surprised if your prospective employer wants you to go through a “tryout” or trail period before committing to a permanent position. BusinessWeek reports the practice of hiring executives on an interim basis is becoming more common.

At one time or another all executives have experienced that special horror—the moment when they realize they’ve hired the wrong person. For Justin Moore, the revelation came during his chief financial officer’s first week on the job. As Moore, CEO of Axcient, a data storage company in Mountain View, Calif., was scrawling out scenarios at the whiteboard, he started to feel as if he were pulling the new guy up a hill. “I was constantly having to lead him into a high-level discussion and say, ‘Come on, get high-level again. Let’s think more strategy here.'”

Moore had an out. Like a number of executives, he has scotched standard operating procedure in favor of a new hiring strategy: trying before buying. Once Moore finds a potential candidate, he auditions him or her before making a permanent offer. Sometimes tryouts last weeks, sometimes months. Why get married after only a few dates? “It’s foolish of any of us to think our interview skills are so great we can predict how well someone is going to work in terms of the dynamics of a team,” says Moore.

The idea of interim executives also has some benefits for the employee. In today’s world of instant information, you can wait to update your LinkedIn profile until the job becomes permanent.